Lizbeth

Lizbeth stood by the edge of a lake filled with grape Nehi (the only soft drink she liked), watching as three glowing suns, the size and color of a trio of blood oranges, began to set on the eastern horizon. Three suns and a grape soda lake . . . ? Just another indicator of how bizarre things were in the dreamlands. It was like stepping into a world where the only limitations were your imagination.

The wind was picking up, blowing bits of her russet hair into her face. She sighed as she pushed an errant strand from her eyes. She wished she had a pair of scissors so she could just cut the whole mess of it off. She felt like she needed a change, and lopping her long hair would be an easy way to accomplish it. Finally, she just reached up and grasped the long strands of hair, tying them in a knot at the back of her neck.

“I’m going to be trite, but a penny for your thoughts?”

Lizbeth turned to find Thomas standing behind her, gazing out at the effervescent purple water. He was wearing a long woven caftan that came to his ankles, the fabric thick and homespun, so that he resembled a wandering mendicant monk. He didn’t look at her as he spoke, just kept his face to the water, eyes fixed on something in the far distance.

“If not a penny, then a silver dollar.”

He snapped his fingers and a small silver coin appeared in his palm—which he then held out for her to see.

“Magic tricks don’t impress me,” she said, her voice even.

She didn’t like Thomas, had real trouble reconciling his familial relationship to Tem—they were like night and day, as far as Lizbeth was concerned—and yet she sensed there was something important he needed to say to her, so she tried to keep her dislike in check.

“There are magic tricks anyone can learn,” he said, his gaze still focused far out in the distance. “And then there is the magic that a creature like you is born with, and this must be cultivated for a higher purpose.”

“What? So I can be like you?” She stared at him, willing him to turn and look her way—to tell her this bit about a “higher purpose” directly to her face.

Reading her mind, he pivoted so his eyes locked on her own. Then he smiled, baring his canines, and immediately she wished she could travel back in time and make a different choice. Not to goad him, but to walk away from the conversation before he looked her way. Because now she was trapped, the full power of his gaze pinning her to the spot where she stood as it burrowed into her, tunneling through skin and muscle, aiming for her heart.

“Yes, so you can be like me . . . and Temistocles. You may only be a half-caste, but that still means part of you is like us. And because of that, you will be called up to defend the innocent against the darkness.”

With a concerted effort, Lizbeth was able to ratchet her eyes away from the granite planes of his face. She dropped her gaze to her feet, digging into the sandy shoreline and teasing out a clump of dirty brown mud with her toes. The purple lake and the three suns hadn’t been there when she and Tem had carried the girls into the Red Chapel. They had only appeared when she’d come outside to think.

“I’m already doing what you say,” she murmured, her chin dipped toward the ground. “Isn’t that what combating The Flood is? Fighting the darkness?”

“You’re afraid to look at me,” Thomas said, and she shrugged.

“It’s like looking into the sun.”

He laughed. The first uncalculated sound she’d heard out of his mouth. She looked up and found his countenance much changed. Now there was a welcoming air about him, as if he’d flipped a switch and changed his entire attitude.

“You and your blood sisters think you know me, but I know none of you have ever understood a whit about me. Not really. I loved Devandra’s mother, Melisande. And I would have made her mine if I hadn’t been called back to take my place, to fight the darkness in my own world.”

“Not The Flood?” Lizbeth asked, curious now.

He shrugged.

“You have The Flood. For us it was called the darkness. But though it goes by many names, it is always the same . . . a sickness that slowly overtakes a world and destroys it.”

“Why?” Lizbeth asked.

“If I knew the answer to that, well, I don’t think we’d be staring at your soda lake and having this conversation.”

Lizbeth stared back at him.

“Wait? Are you saying this lake is really and truly filled with my favorite soda?”

She was shocked. She’d just assumed the lake had been created to look like grape Nehi. She’d never in a million years have dreamed that it actually was made of the stuff.

“Why not?” Thomas asked.

Lizbeth didn’t have an answer for him, instead, she murmured under her breath: “This place is so weird.”

“This is the crossroads of everywhere, the hub upon which all universes spin. Of course it’s going to be ‘weird.’”

He has a point, Lizbeth thought, not wanting to like Thomas, but starting to . . . at least a little bit.

“You said you’re a magician and you want to train me. But so I can do what?”

“Stop The Flood in your world. Do that and it affects all the rest of the universes, as well.”

“Why are we so important?” Lyse asked.

“Because your Earth expelled magic. No other universe was ever able to do so. If you can excommunicate magic . . . you can do the same to the darkness.”

Lyse shook her head.

“No, that’s not right. There was still magic there.”

“It was only the residual of what once was,” Thomas said, and sighed. “It’s why The Flood had to use you to bring magic back fully. What none of you modern witches realize is that the blood sisters were the ones who exiled magic from your world. And then they used the residual magic that was left to keep magic out.”

“I don’t believe you,” Lizbeth said.

“The rituals you did . . . they weren’t to keep the balance,” he said. “They were to keep magic at bay. Magic is what almost destroyed them. Magic is why they were hunted and burned. Magic was the great divider between the blood sisters and normal human beings.”

Lizbeth didn’t know what to say . . . or what to believe.

“Yes,” he said. “I can see the questions on your face. You don’t believe me. Though part of you knows that I’m right. By the way, I’m not reading your mind—though I could if I wanted to.”

“Well, don’t,” she said, glaring at him.

He raised his arms, palms out in supplication.

“Only with your permission. Though I don’t think Temistocles asked for your permission, did he?”

She glared at him.

“That was different. I couldn’t speak. It was how we were able to communicate.”

Thomas raised an eyebrow.

“He could easily have given you a voice. That is within his power.”

She hated how he was trying to sow seeds of discord between her and his brother . . . and she hated how it was working. She could hear the doubt in her own head. The cynical voice questioning Tem’s motives, pulling on this single thread until, if she didn’t get a handle on it, the whole sweater would come undone.

“No, I’m not gonna let you do this!” she said, pushing back with her mind and shoving the thoughts away.

He smiled, pleased—and it dawned on Lizbeth he was provoking her for a reason.

“First lesson. Don’t let anyone in your head. Not me, not even Temistocles. Not anyone.”

She nodded, realizing with a start that her training had already begun.

“What if I don’t want this?” she asked.

“Destiny is destiny.”

His tone was light, but the meaning was clear: You don’t get a say in this, Dream Keeper.

The slam of a door undercut the moment. Lizbeth turned to see Ginny and Marji running toward her. She’d left them dreaming in the Red Chapel, but Tem must’ve woken them up. They were bright-eyed and full of energy, speeding down the path that led to the lake.

“Girls?” Lizbeth called.

“We talked to Mama and Daddy,” Ginny cried as she flung herself at Lizbeth’s waist. “On the phone! There’s a lake behind you. Why is there a lake?”

The little girl’s mouth was moving a mile a minute.

“Slow down and tell me all that again,” Lizbeth said, stroking Ginny’s hair. The girl was clinging to her like a little mollusk, her stick-thin arms stronger than Lizbeth could’ve imagined.

“There’s a phone in the Red Chapel,” Marji said, breathless from running. “And it started ringing and Ginny answered it. It was Mama and Daddy.”

The girls were ecstatic from the effects of one phone call. Lizbeth could imagine the sheer joy they’d experience once they’d been reunited with their parents.

“LB,” Marji continued as she sat down in the sand and looked up at Lizbeth. “Are we going home soon?”

Lizbeth wasn’t sure what kind of home the girls would be going back to, but she supposed that wherever Freddy and Dev were, it would be home enough.

“I think so, lovey,” Thomas said, before Lizbeth could answer.

The girls looked back at him and he smiled. Neither of them seemed afraid of the man, and that made Lizbeth feel better about him.

“I miss home,” Ginny said, turning back to Lizbeth.

“Soon, Ginny,” Lizbeth said, letting the girl tuck in under her arm. “Did your mom and dad ask you to tell me anything?”

Marji nodded her head with vigor.

“They said to take care of us and keep us safe.”

Nothing could’ve crushed Lizbeth’s heart more—

“That I can do,” Lizbeth said, pulling them both to her and hugging them tight. She felt responsible for Dev’s daughters, and she vowed right then and there to do everything in her power to keep them as safe and sound as possible.

“We need to get the girls away from here—”

Lizbeth was surprised to hear fear in Tem’s voice as he ran up the path toward them. His eyes were on Thomas as he spoke, but he came right to Lizbeth and the girls, his hand grasping Lizbeth’s shoulder.

“What’s happening?” Lizbeth asked, trying to keep her voice neutral so she wouldn’t scare Marji and Ginny.

“It’s coming,” Marji said, matter-of-factly.

“What’re you talking about?” Lizbeth asked her.

Marji shivered.

“The bad thing. It wants you, LB. And it wants me and Ginny, too,” she said. “If it can get us, it will.”

Tem gripped Lizbeth’s shoulder harder and began leading her away.

“We won’t let it get you,” Tem said, still looking at Thomas.

Thomas nodded.

“No, that’s not going to happen. But I don’t think going back to the Red Chapel will protect us.”

“All right,” Tem said.

“At least, not the Red Chapel here in the dreamlands,” Thomas added.

“You think it’s safer in the real world?” Lizbeth asked.

Thomas frowned, surveying the landscape ahead of them.

“Dealing with The Flood, in some ways, is easier than with the darkness here.”

“Then let’s go,” Tem said.

“But Mama’s coming,” Marji said. “We can’t go. Mama’s here. I can feel her.”

Tem and Thomas exchanged a look.

“You can feel her?” Thomas asked Marji—but it was Ginny who spoke up.

“Marji feels stuff sometimes, and if she says Mama’s here she means it.”

Thomas patted the small girl’s hair.

“You’re a good sister, Ginny,” he said, then turned to Marji. “And you’re lucky to have her and she, you. Stay together always. No matter what happens. Stay close to each other.”

Ginny nodded and reached out to take Marji’s hand.

Thomas returned his attention to Tem and Lizbeth.

“I wanted to keep the girls here because I felt like it was safer, but I was wrong. Tem, you feel it coming and so does Marji. I trust the two of you and your instincts,” he said. “Do you feel Devandra here in the dreamlands?”

Tem closed his eyes. To Lizbeth, it looked like he was dreaming, his eyeballs flicking back and forth underneath his eyelids—but then he opened them and shook his head.

“I feel something, but it’s being blocked by the darkness. It doesn’t want me to know,” he said. “So I assume that means someone is here to collect the girls.”

“Then we stay and wait as long as we can,” Thomas said. “And when we can’t stay any longer, we go.

The girls stared at Thomas with round, wide eyes. They seemed to understand that he was giving Dev, and anyone else with her, a chance to find them.

“Eleanora and Hessika will know what’s happening,” Lizbeth said to Tem. “Can you reach them?”

Tem shook his head.

“It’s as if I’m reaching out through murky psychic waters, pet,” he said, giving her a sad smile. “The darkness is close and it’s insistent about keeping us out of the loop.”

“Why has it taken so long for it to find us?” Lizbeth asked, uncertain about the wisdom of staying put.

Tem looked at Thomas.

“There was witch blood spilled here at the Red Chapel in the recent past, and the energy released by the slaying can be drawn upon to cast a protection spell—”

“Which is what Thomas did as soon as he arrived with Marji and Ginny,” Tem finished for his brother.

“But we knew it would only last for so long,” Thomas said. “And now the time has come to move on.”

“Thomas really did make a spell, LB,” Ginny said. “It was magic!”

Thomas grinned down at Ginny.

“The girls helped me,” he said. “They said a magic spell while I worked.”

“Moon shadow fall on me, protect all the important things you see,” Ginny said, emphasizing the rhyming quality of the spell. “We had to say it a lot, LB.”

“I bet you did,” Lizbeth said, then mouthed a Thank you to Thomas. Obviously, he’d given the girls a task to take their minds off all of the awful things that had happened to them.

“It was an important part of the spell,” Thomas said, as if to dispel the thought he’d given the girls a mindless job to do. “Less about the words and more about the intent, correct, Marjoram?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied, smiling shyly back at him.

“Shall we play a game while we wait?” Tem asked, guiding Lizbeth and the girls away from the lake. “I bet if we wish very hard, we might be able to find a lovely yellow bag of Bananagrams somewhere inside the Red Chapel.”

Lizbeth let him lead them away, but not before she caught the look of intense worry on Thomas’s face. That look sealed her trust . . . and terrified her to the bone.

•   •   •

Lizbeth enjoyed watching Tem with Marji and Ginny as he occupied them with Bananagrams. He didn’t let the girls win, per se, but it was obvious after the first round, when he was losing by a wide margin, that his concentration wasn’t fully on the game at hand. He looked up at Lizbeth a few times from his perch at the kitchen island and gave her a wink, letting her know that he knew she was watching.

It was hard for her not to stare at him. They had this strange, intimate connection—had had it from the very moment they’d met—and even though Lizbeth knew that he was not truly available to her, she couldn’t help wishing that he were alive again. It wasn’t that she wanted to be his girlfriend, or anything so normal . . . she just wanted him to be a part of her life. And if he was trapped here in the dreamlands, she wasn’t sure how their continued friendship would be possible. She guessed she could visit him here whenever she wanted, but it just wasn’t the same. Just didn’t feel right.

“Let Temistocles entertain them and we finish our conversation,” Thomas said as he came to sit on the couch beside Lizbeth.

“Okay,” she said—the first time she’d had a reasonably pleasant interaction with him.

He noticed and his whole demeanor changed. He seemed to relax, his shoulders lowering and his eyes brightening. Lizbeth realized he’d been waiting a long time for her to give him permission to be himself.

“Yes, it’s been difficult,” he said, then held up his hand, “and, no, I wasn’t reading your mind. It’s clear what you were thinking.”

“What happened to you?” she asked, beginning to see that there were more similarities between Thomas and Tem than she’d been willing to acknowledge.

“We were cocky, Tem and me. We thought we could control the darkness, but we were naïve. The darkness cannot be controlled . . . only kept at bay,” he said, a catch in his voice as he spoke. “We were caught and Tem was spelled out of existence, but I was given to your world, to The Flood, so my powers might be used against the woman I loved . . . and her family.”

Lizbeth’s heart broke for him. She couldn’t imagine what that would be like—to be used as a tool to destroy the person you loved. It was a terrifying proposition.

“Time runs differently in our universe than in yours,” he continued. “When I left Devandra’s mother, she was a young woman . . . and I truly did think I’d find a way to get back to her. But sadly, time does not run backward anymore and the window passed. So shocking to see the one you loved grow old without you. And you only having left her days before. It’s chilling.”

“Will that happen to us here?” Lizbeth asked, and Thomas shook his head.

“The difference in time between your world and the dreamlands is very slight. That cannot be said for our world—”

His eyes flicked over to Tem, who was trying to convince the girls that stegalump was a word. To his pretend consternation, Marji and Ginny were having none of it.

“—but that’s neither here nor there. Suffice it to say, I was used against my will to do damage and it was only the combined effort of your coven that broke the spell I was under. Of course, I don’t expect any of you to believe me.”

He said the last part with a yawning sadness that made Lizbeth feel awful for treating him badly.

“You brought the girls here. You saved them.”

He shrugged.

“It was all I could do. I didn’t know the house had been compromised until it was too late.”

“By what?” Lizbeth wasn’t sure she understood what he was talking about.

“The girls were given a magical object. A stone. They didn’t know what it was or what it would do, but its presence made all the work we’d done less than worthless—it made our spells dangerous. It borrowed the energy we’d expended and turned it back on us,” he finished.

Sitting at the kitchen island, the girls were giving Tem a hard time, but he was taking it like a champ. He was good with them, treating them not like children, but like human beings that had opinions and thoughts and needs of their own.

“You say we can’t stop it, but we can keep it at bay?” Lizbeth asked. “How do we do that?”

“We train you so that you can take Tem’s place.”

Lizbeth shook her head and sat up straighter on the clean, white couch.

“His place?” She felt ridiculous asking so many questions, but she really didn’t know.

“We are—were—the guardians between the dreamlands and your world. Our job was to make sure the darkness didn’t slip past us and leak fully into your world like it did into ours and countless others . . .”

“But what about when the blood sisters banished the magic. Didn’t that protect us?”

Thomas weighed the question.

“When magic disappeared from your world . . . it did keep the darkness away. For a while.”

“But not forever. It found a way in,” Lizbeth offered.

Thomas agreed. “Yes, it found a way in . . . through us . . . our negligence. We should’ve been on guard, but we were on Earth, enjoying the fruits of your world and not minding what we should’ve been minding. And just as bad, we should’ve found you and looked after you.”

“Because I’m the last Dream Keeper?” Lizbeth asked, and Thomas nodded. “Hessika knew The Flood was coming and that I was part of it. She made sure the Echo Park coven took me in and protected me. So that worked out okay.”

“Yes, they did well by you,” Thomas said. “But now it is my and Tem’s turn to look after you. You belong with us.”

“And what will happen to The Flood?” she asked.

“The Flood is just the earthly manifestation of the darkness. The mask it wears, if you will. When we banish the darkness, The Flood will cease to have power.”

Lizbeth thought she was beginning to piece it all together.

“And how do you banish the darkness? Can you keep it just here in the dreamlands . . . ?”

“That would be nice,” Thomas said. “Though I’m not sure it’s even possible now.”

Lizbeth disagreed. This was exactly what Hessika and the other Dream Keepers had foreseen. That The Flood would come and only a handful of blood sisters would be able to stem the tide. She and her witches from the Echo Park coven. If anyone had a chance of fixing things, it would be them. Lizbeth didn’t argue with him. She would let Thomas and Tem train her . . . but only after she and her coven mates had tried their hand at stopping The Flood.

“What happens if we fail and The Flood wins?”

“The darkness will own your world and it will become like ours.”

Lizbeth hadn’t heard Tem speak much of his world, but she sensed Thomas wanted to talk about it even less.

“What does that mean?”

Thomas looked at his hands, his fingers clasped so tight they were white and bloodless.

“Our world is a wasteland, Lizbeth, and we are part of only a handful of our kind left. It’s why we need you. You have enough of our blood to help us.”

She didn’t push him to illuminate.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” she said, finding herself speaking before she’d really thought the idea through. “So long as you help us kick The Flood’s ass, I’ll give you my word that I’ll do whatever you ask of me after.”

“Just like that? No further negotiation?”

She shook her head.

“That’s it. No further negotiation.”

“Well, we’d already planned to help in any and all ways that we can—”

Lizbeth laughed.

“Then it’s a deal.”

They shook hands.

“This may all be for naught,” Thomas said, suddenly serious.

Lizbeth smiled at him.

“Then we go out trying.”